Monday, November 25, 2013

I had a bit of extra time in my grade 9 class as my students had mostly finished the review they were working on before the end of the period. As I thought about how I could fill the time, it occurred to me that my students had little experience in trying to figure out what was going to be on a test.

I decided that I would have them work in groups of 4 to come up with good questions for a test. In addition to a question they needed to work out a solution to their problem. I expected to get a lot of knowledge type questions (calculate, graph, etc.). I did get some of those questions but I also had some great thinking questions. I was very excited that some groups came up with 'how' or 'why' questions. Some of the questions were so good I wished that I hadn't made up the test yet. They would have made good test questions. We shared the questions with the class so that everyone could work on them. Perhaps next time I will have to give this type of work a little earlier in the unit and give students class time to work on solutions.

As a bonus, the activity forced students to work on their vocabulary. The questions had to be clear enough so that everyone understood.